Why whom is doomed - and by who

I see your headline "Signed, sealed, delivered: by who?" has been "corrected", perhaps under pressure from those like Andrew Papworth (Letters, Technology, 15 January), who described that "who" as "poor English grammar". It wasn't poor. Your headline-writer was expressing in print what is said by many. It could only have been legitimately called "poor" if the usage had created difficulties for the reader. Neither the Guardian nor anyone else should let themselves be cowed by the grammar bullies, who more often than not are talking about style preferences.

There is a long and noble tradition of putting whoms and whos where prescriptive grammarians don't like them - Shakespeare, the Authorised Version of the Bible, Defoe and so on. What's more, the usual explanation for when to use who (ie when you would use he and she) and whom (ie when you would use him and her) doesn't apply in all situations and as an explanation has come under fire for being itself a non-grammatical way of determining usage. That's to say, a linguistic form that requires a justification from outside its own paradigm is unsatisfactory. Either way, whom is doomed. People are either creating constructions where they don't need to use the relative pronoun at all, or they "who" it. Michael RosenLondon

The notion that Victorian novels "encouraged altruistic genes to spread" is the kind of nonsense one has come to expect from "evolutionary psychologists" (Report, 15 January). Geneticists have yet to find an "altruistic gene", and the consensus is that our brains have evolved very little over the past 70,000 years, so the claim Victorian literature could have any biological impact is plain silly. Dr Gavin EvansLondon